A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Some time ago I fell for an alarmist hoax which included the suggestion that scientists were being leaned on "We have been warned, collectively and individually, that in bringing our findings to public attention we are not only likely to be deprived of all future sources of funding". When it came out as a hoax & not before, it got coverage from Reuters, BBC, Guardian & other honest & impartial news disseminators.

Well scientists are being leaned on. Strangely enough all the above mentioned impartial sources have decided not to report on this letter from Dr Joanne Simpson, the first female meteorologist to receive her doctorate, she received the American Meteorological Society’s highest honor, the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Award. She went on to become that same organization’s first female president. NASA has recognized her as well, bestowing its Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award upon her. She even has one of NASA’s CRAY T3E supercomputers named after her. So quite high powered. Now she has retired & says:

Still when Stalin made Lysenkoism compulsory he had scientists shot for scepticism so, though the warming scam has cost the world far more financially they haven't yet actually started the show trials.

PS I suspect Dr Simpson has a fair idea what the TRMM data, due at the February Conference will say.

This was reported by Jerry Pournelle which produced a discussion from which excerpts are put below. It is clear he exaggerated but not by much - there are very occasional medical conditions but it could be thousandths as many as claimed.

"The cross party group on dyslexia has been working hard on coming up with a definition of dyslexia that all 32 local authorities across Scotland will recognise,” Colin said.

“Because no two people are the same it makes it very hard to define it.

Apparently I am not alone in thinking that is not a useful definition of any illness but just a grab-bag excuse. This seems a common response because the article then explains "“When you tell them that no two dyslexics are the same it raises eyebrows.”Indeed.

What we are seeing is the establishment & their trained media mobbing a politician doing what is his plain duty - to try to improve our educational system.

Here is a letter I sent to the Herald (& a couple of variants to others). Despite having published 2 letters attacking Stringer they published neither mine nor any other disagreeing.

I heard a long & sympathetic interview on BBC radio on Wednesday with an educator answering that precise point. She said Mr Stringer's point that dyslexia could not be inherent because it doesn't occur (at least at anything approaching our rates) in Nicaragua & Korea was wrong because Korean & Spanish are so structured that that, among their speakers alone, dyslexia is impossible. While the interviewer accepted this without question I must admit I found it unconvincing.

The alternative would be that he is right and that, however hysterical the "educators" get the facts are against them

Now maybe that letter isn't up to the usual literary standard og Heral letters or as logically argued but I don't think so. The only other option is that they decided not to print anything siding with Stringer quite deliberately.#######################From Pournelle's blog:

"Actual neurological dyslexia exists and there are varieties as well as a distribution of severities. The simplest is difficulty in distinguishing between the letter p and q, and d and b. There are training techniques which will allow many of those which this difficulty to learn how to overcome it. The prevalence of actual physiological dyslexia is not certain but one study found a fairly small number of such in examining a large number of students diagnosed as dyslexic. Mrs. Pournelle as the reading teacher of last resort in the LA County juvenile justice system received hundreds of "dyslexic" students. They all learned to read. Some of those cases took hard work. Others were a bit simpler: the child needed spectacles. One could call poor but correctable eyesight "dyslexia" and be perfectly correct, in that the cause was physiological and the student couldn't read, but I don't see how that's useful.

Roberta would receive inch thick files showing that the school system had not failed: this kid couldn't read because the kid "had" dyslexia. The diagnosis is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy: since the child is dyslexic he can't learn to read, so it would be a waste of time to try to teach him, so -- The fortunate ones were incarcerated by the courts and ended up in Roberta's classroom where they learned to read."

"the "diagnosis: dyslexia means nothing other than "he can't read." If there were some "disease" called dyslexia you did nothing to cure it, yet the student made progress. While true neurological dyslexia exists, it is rare, and requires different techniques from teaching reading to other students........ Dyslexia is not a useful diagnosis because it says nothing about why the student can't read (in your case the problem was letter discrimination -- was his eyesight tested?)"

"My quarrel is not with the concept that there are physiological factors in failure to learn to read, but with the term "dyslexia" which says the kid can't read, but it can't possibly be because the kid was never taught to read. It's not the teacher's fault that this kid is poor protoplasm."

Mrs Pournelle's reading programme which, since it can teach virtually all these kids in prison to read must be the real deal.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

On Tuesday the record's commentator made a typically disparaging attack on the £22 million spent on the Beagle 2, which for all that money didn't even manage to find life on Mars. I wrote this which appears today with the philosophical bits [] taken out. Though it is not the first letter printed it is the longest today. I slightly cheat in accusing him of wanting to spend £500 billion on bank bailouts - what he said was on business bailouts & then included banks on the list, on the other hand that will implicitly cost more than the £500 bn so it evens out. I also don't mention that ESA have now taken over the Beagle project & with the help of a Parliamentary Committee who accused them of inefficiency, now intend to spend 10 times as much next time. Left in its originator's hands they could indeed deliver a better probe for the same cost & if necessary do so 10 times but this would run the risk of succeeding without producing more jobs for ESA bureaucrats, which is what ESA does even more successfully than NASA.

I wouldn't automatically credit an OECD report on the effectiveness of government but the rule is that no organisation, no matter how biased lies in a manner to its disadvantage. (The only slight exception to this is when the villain talking before a similarly inclined audience exaggerates his own cunning.) So if a big government organisation says big government is crap at organising research you can bet on it.

This has a slightly equivocal effect on X-Prizes. On the one hand it makes prizes infinitely more useful than conventional research grants. On the other hand it supports those libertarians who say even that much government involvement is wasteful. I think that patent rights do not & probably cannot, fully reflect the value added to society by successful research so X-Prizes simply slightly level the playing field.

As in the example of Tesla having to give up the rights to AC generation for a pittance.

The arithmetic & methodology of this is quite correct. One could argue that most of those who lose bar jobs get something else, but then would have to argue that they thereby displace somebody else merely passing the problem along. Could also argue that those who don't spend on pubs spend on something else, but certainly their quality of life (which is what poverty is) declines by not being able to choose what to spend their "money" on. I put money in parentheses because money is merely a way of representing the value of what you want to buy & if you can only use it for something else you are thereby impoverished whatever is printed on the note.

In any case such complexities apply to any survey & are ignored because they tend to even out.